blink

oddly coincident with my sudden obsession with tea, a tea shop opened up about 10 minutes walking time from our home. we walked down last night after dinner. it's run by a pleasant but very pushy young Chinese woman. We stayed for a while talking and tasting different teas, and I began to think that she wasn't pushy so much as very nervous and poor at English (though of course, as we commented, her English is better than our Chinese). Still, she had a notion that we were tea experts coming in to try our favorite tea, when in fact, it was quite the opposite: we were there to experience new stuff.

I wanted to try a tea I'd read about ("your favorite?" she asked, and it wasn't easy to communicate that it wasn't my favorite yet since I'd never had it!) called, in english, Lapsang souchong. She had no idea what I was asking for, but fortunately, my smartphone came not only to the rescue, but to the rescue in Chinese! I googled 'lapsang souchong' and the Chinese characters came up in the results. I showed her this and she said, "oh! souchong! We have three kinds!". We tried the black tea varieties (the third was an oolong), both high mountain and low mountain. The high mountain was thinner bodied with an aroma that was more dirt than smoke, the low mountain was darker, thicker, and more smokey.

She really wanted us to try all of her teas, and we tried several more, and even though I wanted not to drink too much, there was no place to dump the tea (no spittoon as in a winery), and it seemed like it would be rude to ask her to dump it for us, so we drank it all. she claimed that black teas have almost no caffeine, only greens do, which is pretty much opposite from my understanding and experience. needless to say, we didn't sleep much last night.

a very nice place she's got, and she said that she's got over 200 teas now, with more on the way. unfortunately, in our opinions, the location is so poor that she won't last long. here's hoping we're wrong.